zoomquilt.org (a project by Nikolaus Baumgarten) is the most original site that I have seen in a while. The first time, I stared at this infinite zoom illusion for several minutes.
As a developer, my curiosity meter went up to 100% (well 97.5%) and I felt this need of finding out how it was implemented.
The first thing that I noticed when I opened the browser’s developer tools is that apart from the basic markup elements, only 46 jpgs, like this one or this one were getting referenced and they coincided with frames in the main animation.
Simple concept but masterfully executed.
I am not going to pretend that I know exactly how the algorithm works but at its simplest, the jpgs are drawn into a HTML canvas object and animated by zooming in or out.
See a similar effect below using random images:
There is also Zoomquilt 2 using a similar idea.